That Other Duchess’s Hairdresser Talks Royals, Celebrities

Type “Kate Middleton” into Google, and “hair” is one of the top searches to come up — after “pregnant” and “twins,” obviously. Needless to say, Camilla Bowles does not garner the same results. But the Duchess of Cornwall does have hair, and that hair has to get cut (and colored, let’s be real) by someone.

That person is London-based Jo Hansford, who can also name-drop celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow. “[Camilla]’s been coming to me for — I dread to think how long — 25, 30 years,” says Hansford, who has mastered the art of appropriate hairdresser/dressee relations. She tells the Telegraph:

I don’t talk to the Duchess about personal things. I don’t want to know. Whatever she wants to tell me that’s fine, but I don’t ask. I’d be devastated if I lost someone like that … We get on incredibly well, because our children are the same age, and we both have grandchildren. She has a fantastic sense of humour, she really does. You’re not best friends, but you build a rapport and you know their hair. When the texture changes, you know how to alter the colour, but in a way that nobody notices there’s been changes.

So, good topics for celebrity hairdresser chats: vacations, dogs, local restaurants, beauty complaints. Bad topics: everything else. In other gossip news, Hansford does have some good horror stories, but not about people we’re interested in:

When you’re dealing with A-listers, they’re always fine, very grounded, unpretentious people … It’s the D- and E-listers who are nightmares.

Presumably the less-famous are crankier because they have to foot all their own salon bills, which, in Hansford’s case, are nothing to sneeze at.